The Germans are famed for their reliability, that and their lack of humour and their early morning sun bed snatching, and their wall and their wars and their reliability. Did I mention reliability already?
Funny old thing is reliability. It’s like knowing what to expect is somehow...... well, naff. In the restaurant world a brand is the key word for reliability. Companies spend millions trying to create a brand, a place for yummy mummies and first time dates to impress. A place that will neither shock nor inspire, a place that will do exactly what it says on the tin, a sterile, pre-fabricated in Slough, middle class sperm bank that will both satisfy and create the board.
Antonio Carluccio is the man responsible for one of the most popular brands in recent times; his Neal Street restaurant in Covent Garden served everyone from Prince Charles to Mick Jagger. Both Jamie Oliver and Gennaldo Contaldo worked under Carluccio and the great man is often credited with popularising Italian food to a nation whose previous notions of pasta stopped with paving slabs of lasagne.
In 2005 with 23 restaurant serving over 60,000 meals per week, Carluccio and his then wife, Presilla Conran sold their share in his eponymous chain of restaurants for a reported £11 million, and with it a piece of his sole. As the brand grew, the resultant quality dropped and to the general public, the friendly faced, bushy browed, outsized Italian ambassador had sold himself down the river. The brand that bore his name was now bigger than the man himself.
As the corporate money machine steamrolled high streets up and down the country, Carluccio was powerless to stop it and in 2008 while slicing a loaf of bread after a lot of whisky he plunge a knife into his own chest.
I’ve eaten at Carluccio’s, one of the new ones with Formica tables and a shiny red Vespa in reception and its bad, but not that bad.
Ocean basket is a brand straight out of sub Sarharan Africa, a country whose entire population seem to eat only in back yards or shopping centres. Like a kind of open prison for gastronomes.
Their latest offering is Kato Paphos, the Avanti Holiday village piazza, a defunct shopping centre cum outdoor food hall with a tiny car park and a three kilometre round trip if you miss the nonexistent signage and the faint waft of chip fat.
Inside resembles a Borstal common room. Black painted walls, graffitied with daily fish prices in a dialect spoken only in Peckham and Camberwell comprehensives.
Think “da best feeshing spot in da world, we’ll put our feesh on da block, in da pan”.
The menu is big and fishy with lots of platters and combinations of the same food. They have a sushi bar which sells amongst other things a sushi fashion sandwich, now also available in the Roy Keane hospitality suite at Old Trafford.
Admittedly I wasn’t brave enough to try the sushi. As a general rule I don’t eat fish unless I can at least smell the sea it once lived in, and to my knowledge salmon hasn’t been landed off the Paphos pier for some years so I stuck to da ship mates platter for one, with some prince prawns, mussels fried fish and two types of calamari.
Complementary bread and dips were true to their Cypriot origins and service was straight off the brand production line, script perfect but lacking any personality with the “I need the money but don’t intend of being here very long” characterless swagger.
Da platter came with a choice of chips, rice or a healthy side salad, enough for da whale! And it all came in a large stainless steel, animal friendly, feeding frenzy trough, encouraging you to ditch the cutlery, roll up your sleeves and get it all into the mix.
Individually all of the constituent parts of the platter were above your run of mill brand average standard. River Nile perch was liberally seasoned and grilled to the point of cooked rather than the cook it to rubber, just to be on the safe side usual brand manifesto. Prince prawns were split in half, slathered in butter and blasted with fire to their moreish, suck the heads dry best. New Zealand green lip mussel plump but watery, befitting of frozen shellfish flown halfway around the world and calamari tubes were more bicycle inner tubes so it was left to the criminally underused calamari tentacles, the herb encrusted, crunchy, crispy jewels in the finding Nemo offal crown to save da day.
So the fish tasted good, the seafood well enough cooked and true to their word, there was enough for da whale. It’s not perfect – the pool of congealed fat and tetra-pack beurre blanc swimming around in the platter could have been leftovers from a liposuction slumber party, but so what?
It’s not trying to be perfect. What it is trying to do is serve reasonable food at a reasonable price and for the most part, feedback has been positive – positive enough that number three is about to roll off the conveyor belt sometime soon in Nicosia.
Let’s hope in the meantime it stays off the whisky and continues to be da beest brand in da town.
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